


discussion of children at prayer (divine in accepting your defeat)

by Ignite_It (Changeling_Serenade)



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crapsack World, Dark, Discussions of Immortality, Found Family, Multi, No One is the Good Guy, Things Go Wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-27
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-15 01:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2209710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Changeling_Serenade/pseuds/Ignite_It
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ryan, Spencer and Brendon died before they could live forever, Pete is ruthless and possibly crazy, the world might be ending, and Jon Walker just wants his family back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	discussion of children at prayer (divine in accepting your defeat)

Jon Walker was standing in a room with four dead bodies, each with a bullet hole in their head. The lab had been a pristine white when he came in, the kind of sterilized clean that resembled a hospital. Now it looked like something out of a low budget slasher flick. Jon had watched a lot of those over the course of his life. He never imagined he’d be the one doing the slashing. Assassination. Mercenary work. Whatever.

The bodies of the scientists lay still where they fell, dead before they really knew what hit them. Jon made sure of that; all the shots were clean and designed to kill on impact. He wasn’t cruel, and he wasn’t keen on giving anyone the slow, messy death that came with bleeding out from, say, a chest wound ( _the rattling breath, blood bubbling from between lips trying desperately to mouth a few precious last words, eye wide with shock and pain and grief, shaking fingers griping tight, tighter, before slowly going slack_ -).

Jon exhaled. He stepped carefully over the bodies, both out of respect for the dead and in an attempt to keep blood off his shoes. He slipped Spencer’s pistol, the one that had fired the four kill shots, into Ryan’s leather holster, the one with the masterfully tooled roses (it had been Ryan’s pride and joy). On the nearest table were five sealed vials, each one holding roughly three tablespoons of liquid. Jon scooped them up carefully, one by one, wrapped them in fabric to cushion them, and slipped them into the messenger bag that hung over his shoulder. Then he pushed his hands into the pockets of Brendon’s hoodie, turned towards the door, and walked out of the lab without looking back once.

He could almost hear Brendon’s voice whispering in his ear, “ _There you go_ , _just one last job. You’re almost there Jon, just finish this one last job_.” 

-

Jon had been a Wanderer almost as far back as he could remember. He didn’t know what happened to his parents, honestly tried not to think about it too much, but was proud to say he had pretty much raised himself. Hopping the hover-rails from desolate city to desolate city, nesting in abandoned buildings for shelter, navigating slums, doing everything from busking to begging to get food were as second nature to him as tying his shoes. He was better off then some people in the same situation as him- he knew how to read and write for one, though neither very well. He could remember an earnest-faced young man whose name might have been Gerard teaching him and a few other dirty, eager kids the basics on one long ride in the lumber compartment of a rusted hover-car. From there, he had managed to figure out enough to get by. He also had good connections, through Tom and others. He wasn’t always alone, but it was a close thing. The though of having a permanent home or anything resembling a family was completely foreign to him.

Until he met Ryan Ross and everything that came with him.

It had been a cold night when Jon had jumped a car that would take him out of the city he had stayed in for a week to find the car was not only already occupied, but himself pinned by the luminescent eyes of the boy who was doing the occupying. Well, there were actually three boys, but only one was awake. The other two were asleep on him, one curled into his shoulder and the other one’s head pillowed on his lap. Jon blinked cautiously. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” said the boy who was awake. “Are you going to hurt us?” He asked this question as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, as if it were something that people _could_ just ask.

Jon was thrown. “I don’t want any trouble.”

The boy’s eyes sharpened into something close to a glare. “I didn’t ask if you if you wanted trouble. I asked if you were going to hurt us.”

Jon found himself saying, “of course not. No.”

The kid stared at him for another long second, before slowly nodding. “I’m Ryan.”

“Name’s Jon,” said Jon. “You do this often?”

“Hum?”

The boy named Ryan had already missed the cue. “Are you a Wanderer,” Jon clarified.

“Oh. No.” Jon’s suspicions were confirmed. “Are you?”

“Yep.” Jon settled himself and his bag against a crate opposite Ryan and his sleeping companions. Normally, he would sit quietly with other people on a car, maybe catch some shuteye if they didn’t seem too shady, but in this case Jon felt strangely obligated to fill the silence. So he talked about himself a little.

He talked about Wandering, and the parts he really liked, and the parts he really didn’t. He talked about how he kept trying to meet up with Tom and his crew these days, but kept missing them. He talked about how he always tried to give any extra food he had that would spoil to stray cats, if he couldn’t find anyone else to give it to.

He talked for a while, Ryan nodding and humming in all the right places, for maybe and hour or so, until the sun started to rise. The two sleeping boys stirred.

“Mmh, Ry?” Muttered the boy who had been slumped on Ryan’s shoulder, “What-“ He blinked his eyes open, saw Jon, and stiffened. “Who the fuck is-“

“Everything’s fine,” said Ryan. “This is Jon. Jon Walker. He’s okay. Jon, this is Spencer,” he indicated the boy who had just spoken, “and Brendon.” This was the boy who had been sleeping on Ryan’s lap, who had woken up much more quietly, looked at Jon with big brown eyes and smiled. Jon found himself smiling back.

 “So where are you guys headed,” asked Jon. “What are your plans?”

 Surprisingly, it was Brendon who spoke up. “We’re running away, Jon Walker,” he said. “And we’re looking for something. But mostly we’re running away. It’ll be an adventure!”

Jon ended up sticking with them. At first because they were obviously as green to this kind of life as someone could get and needed the help. Then, maybe, it was just because Jon liked them.

-

The reasons they ran away were clear cut.

Ryan’s father kept him locked up and isolated in a house that was falling to pieces around them. Jon suspected Ryan’s father actually did more than just lock him up but, hey. If he didn’t want to share, he didn’t want to share.

Brendon was considered a problem child, so his family sent him to a monastery to become a monk. The kind of monk that took a very solemn vow of silence. Jon wasn’t sure why anyone would want to do that to Brendon, especially after hearing him sing. Brendon made a terrible, miserable monk who could never truly keep silent for long stretches at a time, resulting in something called ‘enforced silence’, which made Brendon’s mouth twitch down when it was talked about.

Spencer loved them both too much to leave them to those fates, so he grabbed Ryan, busted Brendon out, and the three of them fled.

What they were looking for was a little less concrete.

There had always been whispers of such a thing, floating down the streets of the slums on warm nights when people told stories. But it was mostly a fairytale. It wasn’t the kind of story anyone sane would put much stock in. But Ryan claimed he heard it from the source, from a friend of his father who worked on the project, and that it was very much real.

“We’re going to live forever Jon,” Ryan said, eyes sparkling as they rarely did, a nearly feverish energy taking him over. “We’re going to find it, and then we’re going to live forever.”

-

Jon sat back in his chair and watched Ryan and Spencer bent together over some floor plans to the next place they were planning to investigate. They made a pretty picture, he thought idly, their hair and breath mingling over the paper, elbows brushing, Ryan’s stick-like angles a nice contrast to Spencer’s softer form. Ryan the fire, the burn, Spencer the balm that soothed it. He was shaken out of this musing by Brendon, who chose that second to fold bonelessly onto his lap. Jon lifted his hands to support him on instinct. Jon had never realized how long he used to go without anyone touching him. Brendon’s tactical personality and touchy-feely-ness had been a shock at first, but now Jon found he liked it.

“What’s up, Bren?” Jon murmured into his ear.

“Nothing,” said Brendon, following his gaze to Spencer and Ryan. “They’re pretty together, aren’t they?”

Jon smiled. “I was just thinking that.”

Brendon grinned at him, bright and happy, left a smacking kiss on his cheek, and jumped off his lap to go twine around Spencer. Jon continued to watch them all, a small smile creeping onto his face and something warm growing in his chest.

-

If they were going to keep looking, they needed money. They started taking on small jobs on the side, stealing and recon and message running, to get it. The word ‘mercenaries’ was never used between them, but Jon was pretty sure all of them thought it sometimes. They were very good at what they did, with Brendon being a master grifter, Spencer’s genius with organization and tech, Jon’s connections, and Ryan’s ability to improvise plans on the spot. They were getting rather infamous, actually.

They ended up breaking into government buildings a lot, which led to people getting the impression they were revolutionaries. That was funny, because they couldn’t be more in it for themselves. Themselves, and Ryan’s dream. Even though that dream was shared by all of them now, even though Brendon sighed dreamily when he thought of it ( _eternal life_ ) and Spencer smiled his most beautiful smile and Jon found himself longing for it, it was always Ryan’s dream.

At night, they would all curl up together in a tangle of limbs wherever they could find shelter, maybe all in one bed if they had enough cash for a motel room, and one night Jon thought, _oh_. This was what a family felt like. This was what love felt like.

He didn’t know how he ever lived without it.

 -

They had been running together over a year.

“We’re going to go in first,” said Spencer, as he and Ryan pulled on dark coats. “Just do a quick perimeter check. You have my gun, right Bren? No, you two keep that.  If anything looks promising, we’ll call you in. It might not be necessary, honestly. This place is kind of a long shot.” But of course they had to check it out anyway, just to be safe. When it came to the Dream, they had to check out every angle without fail.

Brendon nodded. “Cool, Jon and I’ll be waiting.”

Spencer smiled and knocked shoulders with them both. Ryan did a little two-finger salute, then tossed Jon his bag. “Hang on to it?” he asked.

Jon shouldered the bag and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay. We’ll see you soon.” Spencer tugged on Ryan’s arm, and they both slipped away into the darkness. Jon and Brendon tracked their movements until they breached the door and vanished inside the building. Nether one of them spoke, but Brendon began humming softly under his breath. Jon let his eyes droop a little and listened. Hearing Brendon sing was a rare treat, though according to Spencer it didn’t used to be. Brendon used to be the type of person you had to beg to shut up. Apparently the monastery had rubbed off on him, at least a little.

“ _I’m putting out the lantern, find your own way back home_ …” sang Brendon under his breath. He licked his lips. “Hey, hey, Jon, do you think that’s a happy song or a sad song?”

“What?”

“Ryan taught it to me. But, see, that phrase ‘putting out the lantern’ can mean two things.”

“Can it?”

“Yeah. There’s ‘putting out the lantern’ like, hanging a light outside your house to welcome people in and stuff. And in that case the song would mean ‘there’s not much I can do for you, but here’s a light to help you find your way back, I’ll be waiting up when you get here’. But if you use it the other way, you _put out_ the lantern, as in you smother the fire. So then it would mean ‘I’m sick of waiting for you and I’m sick of trying to help you, you can figure this out on your own’. Ryan would never tell me which one it was.”

Jon mulled this over. “Ryan taught you the song?”

“Yeah.”

He slowly nodded. “Then I bet it’s a happy song.”

Brendon shot him a look. “Does Ryan seem the type to sing happy songs?”

“Nah.” Jon’s lips twitched. “He seems like the type of person who would think you need happy songs, though.”

Brendon’s face softened a little, and he grinned. “Maybe now, but you should have seen him when we all first met. He was this little ball of angry-“

And then the building in front of them, the one that had swallowed Ryan and Spencer minutes before, exploded.

-

They were sitting in a shitty dive bar in the middle of a slum when they were approached. Jon had Brendon tucked neatly against his side, and Brendon was doing his best to look so small he disappeared. They both looked haggard, worn down, but Brendon looked worse. Brendon looked like he had had pieces torn out of every part of him and then carelessly put back together the wrong way.

(He had stood against the window of the cheap motel room they had splurged on the night before. His forehead left greasy marks on the glass. He had stood there for so long and been so still that eventually Jon had called softy, “come to bed, Bren.”

There was a long pause. “I want Spencer,” he said in a frail, childish voice, and Jon’s chest tightened and he didn’t say anything because fuck, fuck, _so did he-)_

The man who sat next to them was small and unassuming, skin pale, hair wispy and red-blonde, an old-fashioned looking hat sitting on his head. He ordered water, waited until it came, and took a sip before he nonchalantly addressed them.

“You Walker?” he asked, “Walker and Urie?”

Brendon stiffened a little, but Jon managed to keep it cool. “Maybe. Who’s asking?”

The man didn’t respond, only ran a critical eye over the both of them. “Aren’t there supposed to be four of you?”

Jon forced himself not to react. “Just the two of us. Why are you asking?”

“I have a job for you,” said the man, “One you’re probably going to be very interested in.”

“We don’t-“

“It has to do with something you’re looking for. Something we have the location of.”

Brendon sat up like a dog on point. “What?”

The man raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you the kids who are looking for Pavlov’s Elixir?”

It was weird hearing the project’s real name. They never needed to use it.

“Yes,” Brendon spoke before Jon could. “Yes, we are, do you have something on it?”

“Here,” said the man, pulling a file folder out of his bag and sliding it to the two of them. “Have a look.”

They did. Brendon’s breath hitched and Jon licked his lips.

“Okay. Seems legit.”

“It is legit. Very legit.” The man leaned towards them. “This is something me and my associates would be very interested in acquiring, we just don’t have the resources to go after it ourselves. However, if you _did_ find it for us, we would have no problem sharing the wealth, so to speak. And we’re not just asking you because of your interest in the project. They say you guys are the best.” The last part was said like a challenge.

Nether one of them had taken their eyes off the contents of the folder. “Who did you say your associates were?”

“You might have heard of us,” the man’s face morphs into something like a smile. “We call ourselves the Youngbloods, and it's sort of caught on.”

And Jon had heard of them, because no one _hadn’t_ heard of Pete Wentz and his rebels, his close-knit group of fighters, and their mission to burn down the shitty world they all lived in so a better one could rise from the ashes like a phoenix. The Youngbloods were ruthless and dangerous. Pete Wentz, their leader, was a maniac. Fucking brilliant, but fucking crazy. Jon’s arm tightened around Brendon, who was practically vibrating.

“Can we think about it?” Jon asked.

“Sure.” The man took the folder back with long, clever fingers. “Take the night to think about it. I’ll be here tomorrow to hear your answer.” He smiled disarmingly. “Just ask for Patrick.”

-

When they got back to their shitty motel room, Jon and Brendon fought.

“They’re bad news Bren, you know that! They don’t leave loose ends and they don’t trust anyone but their own, this is too good to be true and you know it, how can you not-“

“You saw the file! They have information, they know exactly where it is. They’re willing to give that to us, Jon, we can find it for real-“

“I don’t think I want it anymore!” The words flew out of Jon’s mouth. “I don’t want it when I know what it cost us, and I don’t want it without-“ he broke off.

Brendon pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and sat heavily on the bed. “I don’t either,” he said. “Not anymore, never without them. But. But I need to finish it. We need to. This was our dream for so long,” mostly Ryan’s dream, but eventually it was all of them, “and I can’t just not see it though to the end, not when it might be so close.”

Jon’s throat felt tight. “I. Bren, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’ve been running around doing this kind of shit my whole life, and I just. I don’t want to _do_ this anymore.”

Brendon stood from the bed and crossed to Jon, reached out and gripped his upper arms. “Then we won’t,” he said quietly, eyes wide and sincere. “We’ll stop. We’ll get out of the business, we’ll find somewhere where we can stay that’s far away from all this shit, alright? We’ll take all the money we have and get out. But just,” he swallowed. “Just this one last job, Jon. One last job, and we’re done forever. One last job for fucking, fucking closure, and then we’re out.”

Brendon’s eyes were watering a little, and Jon had always found it hard to say no to him anyway.

“Okay,” said Jon quietly. All the fight drained out of him, and he and Brendon slumped together in something that’s more of a solution to falling on the floor than an embrace. “One last job. We can do that.”

-

The next morning, they meet Patrick in the same seedy bar as the night before.

“We’ll do it,” said Brendon, and Patrick smiled knowingly and handed the file folder to them.

-

They jumped the car that would carry them the first stretch of their trip barely and hour later. When they got on, someone was already there. He was a skinny guy, undoubtedly taller than the both of them, with messy hair and thick, cracked glasses. He was curled up in a corner of the car, knees tucked to chin, and barely looked up when Brendon and Jon tumbled inside.

It was a long, mostly silent ride- both Jon and Brendon were too uncomfortable to talk freely in front of the unspeaking stranger, and the stranger wasn’t offering anything to speak about. He broke his silence only once, about an hour before they reached their destination.

“The world’s ending, you know,” he said, twig-like arms wrapping around his calves. “The whole entire world is ending right now.”

You always got some crazies jumping the rails.

-

A guy had been tailing them for the past three streets. They had both been aware of him for almost as long, but they waited until they were in a mostly isolated part of the slum they were passing through to turn and confront him.

“Can we help you with something?” asked Jon mildly. Brendon was tensed up like a spring next to him.

The man, who was no one they recognized, looked a little surprised at being found out. His eyes flickered madly back and forth. He was filthy and ragged looking. Jon thought he might be on stims.

“Where’s Stump?” he demanded.

“Who?”

“ _Stump!”_ The man was suddenly yelling, expression twisting into something animal. Jon felt a little stab of fear. “Patrick Stump, where the fuck is he?”

Brendon raised his hands soothingly. “He’s not here dude, take a deep breath.”

“What do you mean he’s not here, they all said he was meeting with you!”

“He did, a few days ago and three cities back. See, this is all a misunderstanding, let’s just-“

Then the man pulled out a gun, and everything got very slow, to the point where Jon almost didn’t hear the gun go off. He heard the noise Brendon made though, the wet little half-gasp of shock and pain. Jon reacted before he could think. He drew Spencer’s gun and shot the man through the skull.

Over the course of his life, Jon Walker had discovered that there were different kinds of death. Spencer and Ryan’s had happened in the space between two heartbeats, the blink of an eye, too fast to really process. There had been no bodies to bury and cry over, no cold faces to touch one last time. It had been a lightning quick death, and as awful as it was, there was something to be said about that.

Brendon’s was not any of that. Brendon’s was blood foaming out from between colorless lips and breath getting trapped in the chest with no way out. Brendon’s was clutching his hand like a life line and muttering ‘you’re going to be okay, you’re going to be fine, hold on’. Brendon’s death was the rattling, choked out ‘Jon’ that fell from his lips, and the fingers he was holding slowly going slack.

Jon shot the dead murderer’s body six more times. He spent the next day digging a grave next to the hover-rail tracks, and laid Brendon in it like he’d put a child to sleep.

Jon put on Brendon’s hoodie. He put Spencer’s gun into Ryan’s holster and jumped one last hover-car, the one that would take him to the lab that the file talked about.

One last job, Brendon had said. They just needed to do one last job.

-

Jon sat in a dim waiting room done up in black and red. The chair was stiff and uncomfortable, and honestly so was he. He imagined he could feel Spencer’s hand in his, squeezing in encouragement, or maybe Brendon’s assured smile, or Ryan’s voice.

In the bag on his lap, Jon held the object that had fueled Ryan’s obsession for years, that had been Ryan’s dream since childhood. Immortality. Near invulnerability. A shining eternity to be shared with Spencer, and then with Spencer and Brendon, and then extended to Spencer and Brendon and Jon. An eternity together, with no one to hurt them and no one to stop them. No father to lock Ryan away, no monks to stop Brendon from singing as often and as loudly as he wanted, no stress on Spencer to keep them all safe, no more aimless, lonely wandering for Jon.

It had been such a good dream, the one Ryan had infected them all with. Maybe, in hindsight, an impossible one, but so good while it lasted.

Looking at the bag in his hands now, imagining he could feel each individual bottle of liquid, Jon no longer found the idea of eternity so appealing. He wanted rest, for the first time in his life, true to the words he spoke in his and Brendon’s last argument. Just rest.

Someone cleared their throat, and Jon looked up to see a pretty blonde girl with a button nose.

“They’re ready for you,” she said. Jon nodded, stood up, shouldered his bag, and walked through the door.

-

The office was decorated in the same color scheme as the waiting room outside, and was just as dim. There were four men waiting for Jon when he walked in. One of them was Patrick from the bar, Patrick who the junkie that killed Brendon had been looking for. Jon didn’t even have the energy left to hate him. There was another man with red-ish hair, who was leaning against the wall with his eyes on his feet and didn’t acknowledge Jon’s presence, and a guy with curly brown hair who sat in a chair next to the desk. Jon guessed that the man who sat behind the desk, a wide smile on his face, was Pete Wentz himself.

Jon stopped about four feet from the desk. No one mentioned the fact that there was only one of him, as opposed to the two Patrick had met with. Jon chose not to examine that too much.

“Here,” he said, placing the bag on the desk, flipping it open and stepping back, his hands in his pockets. “Like we agreed. That’s all of it.”

Pete reached in and scooped a vial up in his hands. He turned it over a few times and tapped at the glass with his finger nails. Without looking back, he held it up with one hand. “Joe?”

The man with the curly hair plucked it from Pete’s fingers. He held it up to the light, shook it, broke the seal, opened the cap and took a sniff. Joe shrugged. “Seems legit, boss.”

“Perfect!” Pete’s grin was poisoned sunshine. “Guess you’re as good as they say.”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “Guess I am.”

“You sure we can’t convince you to join our cause?” Pete leaned forward, still smiling the slightly-manic smile. He elbowed Patrick companionably in the side. “We’re going to change the world, you know. We could use someone like you, right Trick?”

Patrick’s lips twitched up. “Of course.”

“No, thanks,” Said Jon, “I’m not really looking for anything like that right now.” Or ever again.

Pete shrugged. “Too bad. Andy?” Pete motioned with his right hand. The last man moved suddenly and smoothly. He drew a gun and pointed it between Jon’s eyes. Jon barely blinked. Pete leaned towards him, eyes earnest.

“You get why we have to do this, right? Just tying up loose ends. No hard feelings?”

Jon, staring down the barrel of a gun, laughed a little and pulled his hands out of his pockets.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he smiled wryly and without fear. “This is my last job.”

He never thought those words would bring the relief they did.

Jon felt the phantom of Brendon’s hand slip into his, Ryan’s on the other side. He felt Spencer’s, warm and sure, on both his shoulders.

“You’re a weird one,” said Pete, shaking his head, “but thanks again for your help.” Then he must have given a single Jon couldn’t see, because there was a gunshot like a crack in the universe opening up, and all of the ghostly hands of his best friends yanked back at once. Jon felt a sensation not unlike a marionette’s strings being cut, followed by a long fall through unmoving air. And then there was nothing.

 

And then, quite suddenly, Jon Walker was home.

 

END


End file.
